Misbah Mahmoodi, Director Product Marketing, vCloud NFV, VMware

VMware started life in the enterprise providing agility and dev-ops through virtualisation, so how does it expect to play in the telco space? According to Misbah there’s a nice complementary role to be had.

“From VMware’s perspective, we really embrace OpenStack and we think it’s a great opportunity for operators to develop their new services and applications,” Misbah says. “If you look at the NFV model: at the top you have the management and orchestration system, underneath the virtual network functions, then below that you have the NFV infrastructure - the NFVi - which is our area. We provide the compute, storage and networking and the virtual infrastructure manager. So we use OpenStack to interface the virtual infrastructure manager to the compute storage and networking. Developers can go ahead and launch new services on VMware infrastructure using OpenStack.